22/01/2014

Marketplace and bloggers are a match made in heaven! We got chatting to new Australian boutique (and keen style blogger) Jiawa of Closet Voyage to find out why...

Tell us a bit more about your blog and street style over in Australia!

I’m just a girl who likes to take photos of what I wear and Closet Voyage documents my journey through discovering and rediscovering my personal style.

While being a blogger in glamorous locations like New York or London would be amazing, I truly feel very lucky to be a blogger in Australia, which has a burgeoning blogging and street style culture.

Street style in Australia is so unique because it revolves around comfort and casual dressing. It reflects our world-renowned laidback attitude and, well, the heat! Australian fashionistas have immense creativity for repurposing more dressy styles for everyday wear and making it all look effortless. We are more likely to head out in flat sandals than stiletto heels, and every Aussie girl spends half of her life in her denim cutoffs. That said, we also absorb influences from all around the world, so there’s so much diversity.

Why did you decide to set up shop here on ASOS Marketplace?

After a spate of failed schemes trying to resell my preloved clothing via markets, yard sales, clothing exchanges, you name it, I was really excited to hear about ASOS Marketplace. However, I hesitated about joining at first because, honestly, I felt a little intimidated by the high quality of the sellers and their amazing photography. The site reads like a street style blog, except all the clothes are up for grabs!

I finally sat myself down one day and created an account, just to try it out. Considering all the other beyond amazing boutiques on the Marketplace, I never expected to sell anything, but I was pleasantly surprised to have a sale the very next day. At that point I was really starting to regret having sold piles of clothing to my local second hand shop for $1 a piece!

We know bloggers are notorious for having wardrobes full of clothes – do you think it's important to recycle your pre-loved pieces?

As a blogger, you really do accumulate an inordinate amount of clothing – an occupational hazard. You might think it would be easy for bloggers to sell their clothes because of their existing fan base, but the missing link is always the appropriate forum.

Because I recycle my wardrobe regularly, I’ve been around the block with all the strategies out there for selling your second hand clothes, and let me tell you, some can have massive draw backs. As I experience more of ASOS Marketplace, I’m increasingly convinced that it’s an absolutely wonderful place for bloggers to recycle their clothes.

We bloggers already take loads of photos of our outfits, and our style of photography is just perfect for ASOS Marketplace’s aesthetic. On other auction websites, quality photography is often cheapened by tiny thumbnails and the overuse of stock images by other sellers, so good photos don’t necessarily lead to good sales. This is where I can see that ASOS Marketplace’s stringent imagery standards are turning that culture around.

I’ve been impressed by so many aspects of Marketplace, but first and foremost, I feel that bloggers like me are pitching to the right audience – girls like me who aren’t too concerned with labels and are on the lookout for the unique. We are all sentimental about our preloved clothes, bloggers in particular, and in the end you want to know that they are going to people who will love them as much as you did.

What can we expect to see stocked in your boutique in the coming weeks?

You never know what you’ll find at Closet Voyage Shop – a video game T shirt? A latex skirt? Art Nouveau leggings? The pieces in my shop are as eclectic and ever changing as my personal style, and are curated for the shameless attention seeker in us all.

See what Jiawa has in store right now and click through to Closet Voyage.